Book Reviews

"Meta Modern Era is a powerful yet sensitive book which takes a hard and
uncompromising look at the relentless deterioration in the quality of modern
society. Based on the author's acute observation of our current obsession
with the pursuit of illusory goals, the book takes the reader on a journey
exploring many of the motives and misconceptions which now inform our everyday lives.

The prose itself makes little or no concession to the modern fashion for stylised
penmanship, instead concentrating on conveying the facts in as powerful a way as
possible. This is not a book that makes easy bedtime reading. For those who
persevere, however, it provides a fascinating insight into some of the
most damaging aspects of our times, as well as offering some uniquely wise
and spiritually enlightened solutions for the new millennium.

What stands out in Meta Modern Era is the unflinching sincerity of the
author, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi. Her point of view is unusually deep and
broad, moving from universally-applicable principles to tightly-focused
examples of Western culture.

The book assumes the reader is concerned about global peace, justice,
and righteousness, and asks the reader to seek a higher, nobler awareness.
Rigid and rabid dogmas re not just criticized, but denounced.

While stern in many places, the tone is one of Motherly concern, not
condemnation, for the follies of Western culture.

One must read the book with an open mind and heart, as Shri Mataji
spares no aspect of modern culture - political, psychological and spiritual
- in her heartfelt and beautifully written analysis.

The book draws to a close on a more personal, biographical note, and
concludes with Shri Mataji's explanation of our individual spiritual
potential. The perspective has moved from the cosmic to the personal,
as a spiritual perspective must.

At a time when words like "postmodernism", "millennium" and
"globalization" are indiscriminately peppered about to sell everything from wristwatches to
television shows, when terms such as "paradigm shift", "new age" and "zeitgeist" are
supplied wholesale as talking points in our journey into a unknown future, H.H.
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi writes as a breath of fresh air, blowing away cobwebs
of conception about who we think we are.

In her preface, Shri Mataji admits the difficulties of writing about the Western
World. It is like an enormous tree, she says, which has grown with tremendous
outward flourishes, but has no roots. The Western mind has been kept away from
the truth by all our society's superficialities and distractions. Our rational
intellects have not allowed us to grasp the simple and obvious.

The present era is a slippery time of shifting values. The sands in which
we seek to establish a footing come and go - each fad, in its turn, scarring
the human psyche. The balance that must be restored to our lives will not be
established through the accumulation of money, but in the assumption of responsibility
- the responsibility to set things right.

The model that Shri Mataji envisions is one of innate human culture, of one
world with roots that reach deep into our collective, global past. And she
offers a solution for attaining that stage, a transformation in human awareness
which is now possible for every human being. "A person who can say with
authority what is absolutely right or absolutely wrong has to be an enlightened
person.... It is beyond the normal limitations of the human to say something
about truth so emphatically. And if such a person not only announces but manifests
that truth as reality and expresses it in his life and work, then one should
after all pay serious attention to such a personality. Such a person is a saint,
or a seer, a greatly evolved soul, whose unique individuality is free of all
taints of egoism and conditionings. He is, we might say, meta-modern and does
not care for the limitations of rational understanding, the norms imposed by
the cult of money or the power orientations of fads and fashions in modern
times".

Like the film of the same name, we are caught in modern times like Charlie
Chaplin's tramp, repeatedly and mechanically tightening the widgets on the
conveyor belt long after the machines have stopped running.

The meta modern man or woman does not do things out of dull habit. They do
not serve the machines, the economy, the fad or fashions. "Through his
lifetime he will not do anything that jars or that is considered sinful or
anything that goes against human benevolence. Nor will he create destructive
ideas in the minds of the people. On the contrary, whatever he does is constructive
and compassionate and creates peace over his entire area of activity. Because
it serves the interests of a fuller and more perfect life and promotes human
ascent, his work is of an eternal and absolute nature".

Most writers who have authored books about the new millennium have a concern
in the territory they have staked out. They are part of it, writing from within
the animal they are trying to dissect.

Shri Mataji writes from beyond the limits of our culture. As an Indian, she
knows the streams of Eastern culture, but as a Christian-born wife of a former
United Nations diplomat and as a long time resident of Britain and Italy, she
knows the foibles, the ambitions, the backwaters of our culture. As a woman
of the spirit, she is beyond and above both worlds. And, as a mother, she cares
deeply about what is happening to us. She does not only observe and criticize.
She has compassion. And she has a solution.

She writes of the knowledge of a yet unawakened energy of extraordinary potential
within each of us. She tells us in her book of the language of chakras and
energies. She describes the power of pure knowledge called as "kundalini".

This may sound like an ancient and secret wisdom, but it is only secret because
we have kept it away from ourselves. In our pursuit of the material and the
mundane, we have been too busy to listen to our inner self, and so our roots
have withered.

"Western civilisation is like a very big tree which has outgrown its
own size. But one has to find the roots. If the roots are in India, or any
other country, why do we not accept the knowledge of the roots. A tree cannot
exist without roots and roots have no meaning unless they nourish the trees
which are about to fall."

Meta Modern Era is a groundbreaking book not just to read - but most importantly
to experience. And beyond that, it offers a tangible solution to our problems
by opening our awareness to our yet unexplored inner potential.